Hmm... Getting these terrain changes while also wanting to keep recreating my town is going to be sad and conflicting.... Kind of like Minecraft.

I wonder... if it would be possible to keep roads and buildings while getting the new updates to the terrain... at the risk of having things get dug into the ground, like what has happened to you guys previously, and have a button/option to reset everything (or everything in a selected area) to the new ground level (align with terrain), if the user chooses to do so.

I guess this next question would actually be a bit of a different story when things are done on multiplayer servers, but would these "rocks" be in consistent locations set in the terrain data (that would have to be downloaded/redownloaded from a server) or are these done randomly by the client (and would only be in those locations on that specific user's client once they have been created)? I guess I'm just curious if these would be consistent in the terrain download that we've been using (for single player) since it probably just comes down to file sharing overall.

« Last Edit: February 24, 2013, 10:30:27 am by Jagerbomber »

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"Perhaps this speaks to some larger trend within society today... A prevailing desire on the part of indie developers to recreate the entire world into one where you can charge more than $15 for your game design degree coursework." - Yahtzee

I wonder... if it would be possible to keep roads and buildings while getting the new updates to the terrain... at the risk of having things get dug into the ground.

As advice it would be nice once in a while to make "backups" on your package and data from the coordinates in that "earth" folder.As for buildings and roads, from what I know roads are "terrain" with a different texture and a bit of heightmap, and they are one with the "terrain".And even if the terrain will modify itself in consequence of the update, the roads I think they are "buggy" only if you stick them in to the ground more than a few hundred meters.So the roads will remain no matter what if you have the backup coordinates ( at least from what I know and experienced before ).And for "buildings" .. buildings are actually = objects, so they will sink ( again, from what I know, maybe in the future with collision they will not ).

And my advice to you @Jagerbomer is to use some road "texture" under the specific buildings as a pavement for the base of the building but as well as a design technique to groom the environment.

I wonder... if it would be possible to keep roads and buildings while getting the new updates to the terrain... at the risk of having things get dug into the ground, like what has happened to you guys previously, and have a button/option to reset everything (or everything in a selected area) to the new ground level (align with terrain), if the user chooses to do so.

Right now the buildings are positioned on absolute coordinates, but I want to reference the height to a coarse ground detail level so that they can adapt. But then, they would not adapt to small changes like the rocks.

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I guess this next question would actually be a bit of a different story when things are done on multiplayer servers, but would these "rocks" be in consistent locations set in the terrain data (that would have to be downloaded/redownloaded from a server) or are these done randomly by the client (and would only be in those locations on that specific user's client once they have been created)? I guess I'm just curious if these would be consistent in the terrain download that we've been using (for single player) since it probably just comes down to file sharing overall.

Well this question pops up every once a while, people expecting that random means a different every place&time. But if you think about it, it would be extremely useless for games and predictability and everything. So, technically it's not random. It's based on probabilistic evaluation of perturbation of completely deterministic data, and it produces the same results regardless of place & time, just as one would expect.

Well, except that it produces slightly different results on ATI because of some numerical differences, but that will be fixed